New Cosmos of Photography 2009 Tokyo Exhibition
Report on the open-committee meeting
Grand Prize selection open-committee meeting: Nov.20, 2009(Fri.)
The Grand Prize selection committee of the New Cosmos of Photography 2009 (the 32nd competition) met in front of a public audience on November 20 to select the Grand Prize winner from among five Excellence Award finalists - Adam Hosmer, Misato Kuroda, Masanao Sugiyama, Hitomi Takahashi, and Makoto Yasumori. After the candidates gave their presentations and took questions from the judges, the judges decided to award the New Cosmos of Photography 2009 Grand Prize to Misato Kuroda. The selection meeting was held in the first floor hall of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
Overall Evaluation
General comments on the 32nd competition
Nobuyoshi Araki
I'm not saying digital photography is bad, but it seems like everyone is developing a digital attitude. It's as if they think all they have to do is abbreviate what they do. That, and art has come into fashion, so everyone is trying to use techniques to turn what they're making into art.
Everyone seems to think that pictures of nothing special have low levels of expression, or are some how wrong, but in fact that is the most important thing. It's the world, the photographic subject, that is doing the expressing, and the photographer has to remember that he is the one who has the privilege to be capturing that expression. Using the subject or the era or something to mould something, that's not the essence of photography.
I say this every year, but a sense of love for the subject isn't there, I feel it's getting more and more diluted. There are a lot of works with pictures of people dying, but I think people should stop making that kind of stuff. Or if they do make it, don't send it to this contest. More than that, what's important now is to take pictures at a moment where the subject is vibrant and alive.
More than technique or expression, first get a sense for the person and cherish the time together with them. The person right in front of you is much more important than any kind of grand concepts. If you can remember that, the result will come naturally.
I think maybe everyone has convinced themselves that they know how the world works, or that they can see what is coming next. But if you just keep shooting, you'll eventually figure it out. To keep on shooting is to embrace life.
Kotaro Iizawa
Whenever I go into the selection process, I always think that I'd like to find a work that changes my own awareness, my own worldview. A bunch of pretty pictures, or a piece that exists to explain some kind of methodology just doesn't do it for me.
Looking at this year's submissions, the overall level hadn't dropped per se, and there was a real variety of expression. But even as I was selecting the works, I couldn't get excited about them. I mean there just weren't that many standout works among the submissions. Even looking at the submissions that were in book form, the level of tension just wasn't being maintained from the first page to the last in a lot of these works. I almost got a feeling that people weren't pushing themselves enough. In this troubled era, people seem to be holding themselves back.
I think it's important for people to overextend themselves a bit when they're young. That's when you start to get a sense that you're becoming a real artist; you start to get a sense for the possibilities. That's why I'd like them to show off a bit more. One way to think of it could be to put their personal quirks out front and center. Do something obsessive like making an exhaustive collection of one thing. That's where a new way of expression might begin to grow.
Also, I'd like them to pay more attention to the details. I think it would be good if people tried for a craftsman-like fixation to quality. That's what Japanese people are best at after all. I was disappointed to see so many submissions with sloppy overall finishing.
Fumio Nanjo
This year I got the impression that there were a lot of very well organized works. People with a very solid grasp on their own world who put that view into their works.
On the other hand, there were very few works that really cut loose, or had a violently destructive quality. Even arty works with a constructed image weren't large-scale but rather at a level manageable by one person, very prudently constrained. Before, there were always some submissions that were rather large-scale, and some that were just insane. In other words, recently I get the sense that people are staying more within their narrow personal boundaries.
This trend could be connected with negative world affairs. Lately the economy is bad and society as a whole is in a dark mood. However, instead of breaking that mood, people retreat into a self-constructed fantasy world. This could be escapism, but it does seem to be a trend.
People who think they can be social pioneers should surely be able to find more positive themes. I don't even get a sense of people energetically forging ahead. That could be why many people chose personal issues as their themes. For example, family, lovers, friends, domestic travel, or an imaginary world created by the photographer. These trends have always been there, but they really stood out this year.
It's not enough to just gather some pictures together. It's necessary to pursue a high level of perfection but also destroy it at the same time. If you can express both qualities, the piece will finally develop some profundity. The only way to make this happen is to create a lot. If you go through a lot of work eventually you'll start to understand how to achieve that balance. C'mon everyone, the government has changed, we've got to start thinking about how to reconstruct ourselves too.
Ryoichi Enomoto
The once-in-a-century global financial crisis has managed to creep into the world of photography as well. I did get a sense of wistfulness, of the beauty of austerity. Even with snapshots, the subject is a flat, uninteresting world, so nothing interesting comes into the frame.
Just having the skill to create an image isn't enough to make it interesting, and it just becomes a scene that has lost its strength. It's not the fault of the photographer, rather it's a problem of society itself, I suppose.
The problem with the photographers themselves is that many of the works haven't been completely thought out; I feel they haven't reached the boiling point. There seemed to be a lot of people who were submitting work without really exploring the possibilities of photography as a medium. As a result, they were producing works that could only generate a small degree of empathy in the viewer. In this year's evaluation, I saw a lot of projects where the photographer followed a single person around, and a lot of works featured women of a mature age. But all the works resulted in something very small, and no one managed to produce any grand message through their subjects.
The only way the artist is going to tear down those walls is to keep on creating to an extreme degree, and that creation has got to have something radical in it or it's not going to work. They've got to think something through to such a degree that the viewer is blown away by the result.
If there's nothing interesting in the world, you can't just sit there cuddling up to it. You've got to have the motivation to change the world, to believe that this is not how the world has to be. This year I wasn't really able to get a sense of hope.
Mika Ninagawa
Firstly overall I felt there were a lot of very similar-looking works. I saw a lot of pictures featuring an everyday scene with something bizarre included, or a slightly strange moment during an ordinary day. A lot of works resembled pieces that had won awards in the past. I don't think photography is about taking pictures in order to win prizes so when I see works that seem to have been engineered to be a prizewinning picture I am slightly repulsed.
I was wondering what exactly makes for new expression while I did the screening, but in the end I wound up mainly choosing pictures that were easy to empathize with, that didn't try to be cool so much but just showed things straight. If you try to make something too new, you wind up losing the fundamentals. That's something I rediscovered. The feeling of wanting to record something as a photograph is more important than the pursuit of the new.
Compared to the time back when I was submitting entries to the contest myself, the ways of displaying the works have gotten much better. However, there seemed to be a lot of works that showcased finishing techniques alone, such as the final processing, and methods of producing the color.
I feel as though I wasn't able to encounter any truly impressive expression. I wanted to encounter such a work and get a sense of being threatened I suppose. Everyone is really talented, but nothing stuck in my mind.
I'm not just talking about the works submitted for this contest, but it seems that the photographic ability of photographers these days is slipping overall. I think that if there's a strong core to the work, even if the finishing is a little sloppy, the quality of the picture will shine through.
This year, one of the images I chose for a prize was withdrawn. If people are going to withdraw, I wish they wouldn't enter the contest in the first place.
